Feeding Hens.

Waikato Times, Volume XXII, Issue 1797, 12 January 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

Feeding Hens.

A whiter in the Rural New Yorker says : My plan of feeding hens is to give in the morning corn on the cob broken into pieces about two inches long. This they must pick off for themselves. At noon they have boiled vegetables chopped up with a few handfuls of meat stirred in. This in winter ; but when they can help themselves to vegetable matters I give, instead, oats at noon or meal and bran mixed. There is no third meal, bat after gardens are made the fowls are kept at the barn by occasional tosses of a few handfuls of grain near the barn. The last thing at night I fling about a few handfuls which will bnay them in the early morniDg, and keep them from the oat field, or, later, from the corn. My garden is within five rods of the barn, but is literally untouched by the hens so fur as crops or seeds go, while my neighbour's hens will oome on mischief bent some hundreds of rods. Hens whioh are thus fed are quiet, and while laying abundantly, do pot waste and destroy more than they produce, I have not found the common assertion that a three- year old hen lays few eggs to bo true. My fowls are one, two, three and four-year-olds, and they are, without exception, excellent and persistent layers. Prom twentythree hens I average forty dozen per month for eight months.